Tag: bioethics

The Line: AI And The Future Of Personhood

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

The cover of The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood by James Boyle shows a human head-shaped form in deep blue with a lattice of white lines connecting white dots, like a net or a network. A turquoise background with vertical white lines glows behind the featureless head. In the middle of the image, the title and the author's name are listed in horizontal yellow bars. The typeface is sans serif, with the title spelled in all capital letters.
Cover of The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood by James Boyle. The MIT Press and the Duke University TOME program have released the book using a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA license. The book is free to download and to reissue, augment, or alter following the license requirements. It can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15408.001.0001.

Duke law professor James Boyle said an article on AI personhood gave him some trouble. When he circulated it over a decade ago, he recalled, “Most of the law professors and judges who read it were polite enough to say the arguments were thought provoking, but they clearly thought the topic was the purest kind of science fiction, idle speculation devoid of any practical implication in our lifetimes.” Written in 2010, the article, “Endowed by Their Creator?: The Future of Constitutional Personhood,” made its way online in March 2011 and appeared in print later that year. Now, thirteen years later, Boyle’s “science fiction” of personhood has shed enough fiction and fantasy to become worryingly plausible, and Boyle has refined and expanded his ideas in that 2011 article into a new thoughtful and compelling book.

In the garb of Large Language Models and Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence has shocked us with their uncanny fluency, even though we “know” that under the hood the sentences come from clanky computerized mechanisms, a twenty-first century version of the Mechanical Turk. ChatGPT’s language displays only the utterance of a “stochastic parrot,” to use Emily Bender’s label. Yet, despite knowing the absence of a GPT’ed self or computerized consciousness, we can’t help but be amazed or even a tad threatened when an amiable ChatGPT, Gemini, or other chatbot responds to our “prompt” with (mostly) clear prose. We might even fantasize that there’s a person in there, somewhere.

Boyle’s new book, The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (The MIT Press, 2024) forecasts contours of arguments, both legal and moral, that are likely to trace new boundaries of personhood. “There is a line,” he writes in his introduction. “It is a line that separates persons—entities with moral and legal rights—from nonpersons, things, animals, machines—stuff we can buy, sell, or destroy. In moral and legal terms, it is the line between subject and object.”

The line, Boyle claims, will be redrawn. Freshly, probably incessantly, argued. Messily plotted and retraced. Read more »



Monday, February 14, 2011

Re-Thinking the Ethics of Stem Cell Research

Posted on by Tauriq Moosa

by Tauriq Moosa

There is always the danger of dogmatism lurking within any collection of ideas. A collection of ideas tied together by a singular focus tends to be called an argument. However, it is often refreshing to have such bundles of ideas untethered and scattered after being cut by a sharper focus. It is, I would like to think, the mark of good critical analysis that one is self-critical, too; that you find an argument that you hold destroyed in order to clear the way for a more robust one.

I recently had such an experience regarding the ethics of human embryonic stem cell (HESC) research. Often we secularists, under some weird broad canvas, regard opponents to things like abortion, HESC research and euthanasia as one large pile of dogmatic reactionaries. And no wonder, considering their spokespeople are often dogmatic religious reactionaries who get given airtime on popular news-sources.

But so often forgotten are careful arguments against the typical liberal secularist view that euthanasia and HESC research is not immoral. Consider the insightful abortion debate between two non-believers, Richard Carrier and Jennifer Roth; there we have good arguments instead of speaking from the knee as many people, on both sides, are prone to do in these discussions. It should be immediately apparent that we ought not to perceive ‘our’ side as the sober, good and right, whilst anyone who disagrees as merely fanatical.

To understand the usual arguments for stem-cell research, this quick clip by Sam Harris at Beyond Belief ’06 is an excellent quick overview. But even if you don’t watch it, the arguments will come up during the post.

My experience of this sudden realisation of (possibly) holding fallacious views was through an article by Don Marquis. Professor Marquis is renowned for an article defending a secular argument for why abortion is immoral (see references). However, I encountered him after reading his, again, secular argument against HESC research.

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Monday, October 4, 2010

‘Philosophy Killed My Children’: A Response

Posted on by Tauriq Moosa

Baby-chocolate My previous article, ‘How Philosophy Killed My Children and Why it Should Kill Yours’, seemed to have generated some debate. Unfortunately, there was much heat but little light shed on taking the subject further from most commentators/critics. Yet, what little light was shed by critics is a welcome furthering of this important discussion. Considering I was made into the title of a Nicholas Smyth post on this website, and considering the excess to which the debate collapsed into denigration, dogma and shouting matches, I wish to respond to some of the claims. In fact, this might take longer than the original piece itself considering the widespread misreading of my argument.

My argument is quite simple: there is no reason to create more people and every reason not to. I also attempted to severe the link between parenthood – an ethical attitude of helping younger people, wanting to lessen their suffering, and using our own experience to better theirs – and procreation. The latter is my target. Indeed, parenthood need not be tied to procreation. The parenting-attitude can be applied to those who already exist, not requiring us to create human life to care for. No critic highlighted a good argument to create more people, other than emotional reasons which I highlighted is, firstly, unpersuasive and, secondly, is an insult to adoptive parents who can testify to the reciprocated feelings of their adopted children. That is, we may fulfil the desire for parenthood through non-procreative means, adoption being one way.

But adoption, as they say, is one option. As I highlighted, not all of us – including me, given my age, income, etc. – would pass adoption procedures. The information I have obtained from adoption agencies highlights this much. Being unable to adopt should also tell us something important: if adoption agencies won’t let us be parents to these children, what does that tell us about the automatic pass we get to simply use our reproductive organs to make children? If agencies judge us unfit to be parents for those children who do exist, it should smack hard of blatant arrogance to bypass such a well-founded judgement to produce children of our own (I hope adoptive parents will provide some more personal details on this. I prefer hearing from them, rather from adoption agencies). This is why people who argue unless I adopt I should not judge simply fail to make a point: if I cannot adopt because I would not pass first-level acceptance as an adoptive parent, what gives me the right to just breed away? This should immediately tell me I am unfit as a parent, be it for my own or those who exist.

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